31.May.2016

More smoke from land grabbers

Not that there's anything wrong with an "Idaho Politics Weekly"
publication being "presented by Zions Bank," but yeah, their motives may
be suspect. The poll they just commissioned Dan Jones & Associates
to take is certainly suspicious.
Bob
Bernick's report of it said "Three-fourths of all Idahoans want
the federal land in the state turned over to state government
management." Three-fourths!

The HELL we do.

The supposed precision in the "margin of error" (3.99%!) waves over the
considerably more important aspects of exactly what questions were
asked, with what context, of whom. They claim "603 Idahoans between
April 8 and 19," which implies a ±4% interval as regards
sampling error and its randomness. You have to ask the right
questions, in the right way, to get a non-random answer, plus or minus
anything. Any fish'll bite if you've got good bait.

A month after this poll was taken, the voters in that most Idaho of
Idaho counties had a chance to weigh in and endorse their
incumbent Commissioner who has been tirelessly promoting the idea of
transferring federal lands to the states, or not. By nearly 2 to 1,
Idaho
County voted NO on Jim Chmelik in the primary, in favor of Denis
Duman, a former Cottonwood mayor opposed to a specific land exchange at
issue "and to spending county money to support Chmelik’s land-transfer
efforts."

Yes, that's right, the county commissioner was using taxpayer money for
his promotional touring.

"Chmelik blamed his defeat on sportsmen and conservation groups, which
he said spent thousands on fliers and phone calls making misleading
statements that he would support selling off public lands to private
developers."

“I support a constitutional amendment banning the sale of these lands,”
Chmelik said two weeks ago.

"Courtney Washburn, executive director of
Conservation Voters for Idaho,
gladly accepted the blame or credit, because she knows of no other
groups that campaigned against Chmelik. Her group also targeted Sen.
Sheryl Nuxoll, R-Cottonwood, who had sponsored a bill giving counties
power to declare public lands a nuisance. Nuxoll lost to Carl Crabtree
in the Republican primary."

I trust the Idaho Politics Weekly poll and its reported results a
whole lot less than federal land managers. I'm more confident in federal
management than I am in the state's, given its
demonstrated
preference for selling off its assets to the best-connected
insiders. Consider this
larger,
broader, and better documented poll from 2014, by comparison,
finding a majority opposed to state control and acceptance of the
costs associated with it, a key linkage I'm guessing Dan Jones &
Associates skipped over lightly, or completely. Poll results showing
that yes, most of us would like a free pony if someone else has to
shovel the pony poop is not exactly informative.

30.May.2016

Some things you should know about antibiotics

Before we take that last step to untreatable infections, here's a useful
NYT Health explainer with
Short
Answers to Hard Questions About Antibiotic Resistance. What is it,
should you be scared ("not yet," it says, but seems like it's pretty
close to time), how has it changed medicine, and so on.

Why aren’t there more new antibiotics?

"Most drug companies are not eager to make them. Compared with other
drugs, antibiotics are not big moneymakers, and some manufacturers have
gotten out of the business. Most people take antibiotics just once in a
while, for a short time—unlike drugs for blood pressure, high
cholesterol or diabetes, which most patients will take every day for the
rest of their lives. ..."

But that "fault" that people only take them once in a while, is not true
for their use in agriculture, where livestock are routinely fed
antibiotics for prophylaxis and to promote growth. That's done in
regular, reliable, profitable quantity. (But it doesn't make much demand
for new drugs.)

After a lot of debating about doing the right thing, and a lot of
pushback from the industry, the Food and Drug Administration is going to
wave in the general direction starting January 1, with a policy that
antibiotics “medically important” for humans will no longer be approved
for use to promote growth in livestock, and that veterinarians should
supervise the use of (some) antibiotics in feed or water for livestock.
The biggest loophole doesn't take a brain surgeon to figure out:
"Compliance is voluntary."

A few weeks ago, I stopped into a doctor's office for a bit of personal
business and happened into the middle of a staff meeting. While one
staffer went to tell the doctor I was there, and someone in the
interrupted meeting offered some polite phatic, the cold I'd been
nursing for a week prompted me to ask gee, what's the best thing to take
for a cold? I was thinking about aches and pains, and hoping they might
recommend one of aspirin, ibuprofen or acetaminophen over the others.
"Antibiotics," one of the gals chirped without missing a beat. (In case
you slept through that health lecture, a "cold" is a respiratory
infection caused by a virus—a rhinovirus, in
particular—against which antibiotics have no effect.) I sure hope
she worked in bookkeeping and not as a nurse.

Is there any real harm in taking an antibiotic for a cold?

"There are several risks. ... [H]ealthy people normally carry billions of
bacteria in their noses, throats, skin, genitals and gut. Antibiotics
change the balance of those microbes, killing off susceptible ones and
allowing drug-resistant ones to flourish. Even after a person finishes a
course of antibiotics, the excess of drug-resistant bacteria can persist
for months. ..."

(Unhealthy people carry billions of bacteria in the noses,
throats, skin, genitals and gut, too.)

A modest (and overdue) increase in the minimum wage could reduce crime
by 3 to 5%, and provide a net economic benefit of $8 to $17 billion.
Spending $10 billion more on incarceration could provide a smaller
reduction in crime and would likely have a net economic cost,
rather than benefit. Investing the same amount in police hiring
could benfit society by two or three times the investment.

Oh, and more incarceration could extend our #1 position in the world,
ahead of such bastions as Turkmenistan, Cuba, El Salvador, Thailand,
Belize, Russia, Rwanda and so on. From the Council's summary:

We find that a $10 billion dollar increase in incarceration spending
would reduce crime by 1 to 4 percent (or 55,000 to 340,000 crimes) and
have a net societal benefit of -$8 billion to $1 billion dollars.

At the same time, a $10 billion dollar investment in police hiring would
decrease crime by 5 to 16 percent (440,000 to 1.5 million crimes) have a
net societal benefit of $4 to $38 billion dollars.

Drawing on literature that finds that higher wages for low-income
individuals reduce crime by providing viable and sustainable employment,
CEA finds that raising the minimum wage to $12 by 2020 would result in a
3 to 5 percent crime decrease (250,000 to 510,000 crimes) and a societal
benefit of $8 to $17 billion dollars.

29.May.2016

Trip preparation

That's for my trip commemoration, 40 years ago next
month, which was, as noted in my journal, "199 YRS. & 11 MONTHS"
after the big day in 1776. As luck would have it, I was using a copy of
the 1976 Wisconsin State Historical Society calendar for a journal that
year. The pages are 6x8", one per week with a facing photo, and about
5½ square inches allotted for each day's engagements. Some ran
long, and my block letter font that started 5 lines per day (and
casually wasting 2½ of the four December days on page one) got
smaller, and smaller... to 8 or 9 and sometimes 10 lines in the
inch-high slot for one day, running over the lines as need be, measuring
my commentary with an anxious thought to the space remaining. In late
August, when I flew back to Idaho from Boston, the lines per inch relax
just a moment, tighten, relax to 6 and 7 lpi by year's end, reaching
1977 with half a month to spare. Wish I'd written more while out on the
road!

This image of the rolling hills of Wisconsin was taken by Shirley
Krempel, captioned "SPRING RENEWAL, Richland County," facing the
calendar's last full week of May, and journal entries for 5-25 to 6-2.
That was the week when bicycling everywhere, looking for a summer
job, and spring rain on the Palouse combined to put the idea in my head
of riding my bike across country and back "home" for the summer.
I was well and truly moved to Idaho by then, a year into school in
Moscow, but with 95% of my history in "America's Dairyland."
I'd been out west on various family trips as a kid, and taken multiple
turns hitchhiking and driving in 1973, '74, and '75. It was completely
imaginable to go again, but on a bike this time, even if I had no idea
what that would entail, and my longest ride in a day up to that point
was 20 or 30 miles. Still, most town-to-town trips on the Palouse
had enough vertical to bend you into shape. For my final training, I
rode north one day, up and over the Moscow mountain grade, and the next
day over and down to Troy and back, with books or something loaded on my
Pletscher rack for good measure.

On May 27, my story rambled across the spaces for 5 days and a new moon,
covering yoga, breakfast, a used vacuum cleaner (having just moved from
a dorm to Arny's Trailer Court, some furnishing to do), a ride to
Pullman, Washington (the one less hilly direction), seeing a peacock fly
for the first time in my life, a screw falling out and a bent
chainwheel, a tire going flat and a downpour, a quick ride from "a nice
young man" who dropped me at my door after I hitchhiked to get home,
where "I took the bike apart to diagnose its ills."

AND THEN I WALKED 4 MILES, 3 IN THE DOWNPOUR CHECKING OUT A $2.20
JANITORIAL JOB THAT AT LEAST 50 PEOPLE APPLIED FOR. OH WELL.

When I think back to that day, I can't remember the experience of most
of what I wrote about, but I do remember the epiphany, walking in the
rain, when the notion that "I'll ride my bike across the country
instead" came to me. There's a mental snapshot of the low, gray sky over
tree-lined Moscow streets, and the feeling of "right then," inside my
rain jacket. I called my parents that evening (I'm sure, even though I
can't recall any of the particulars of the conversation), proposed the
idea as an alternative to a summer job at minimum wage, and was
astounded to have my dad agree (and agree to cover my expenses) in an
instant. It was many years later that I came to learn of his many
cross-country adventures as a young man, and to realize how natural and
satisfying it would have been for him to launch his youngest son on one
of his own.

May 28th's entry is barely three lines. "Bought a tent today for.... Don
moved in this afternoon." [Don who? No idea, but probably a dormmate,
and the first of a succession of roommates in my trailer.] "I whipped up
the 5 vegetable, chop & rice deluxe. I'd forgotten what a good cook
I was. He's off to work. We'll do the bed in shifts." The 10x55' trailer
had two bedrooms, but only one bed at that point, apparently. The
ellipsis after the tent purchase was in the original, where the next
four days are an ellipsis as well.

So, now that blogs are a thing, my plan is to recapitulate the story of
my bike-centennial journey this summer, four decades on. We'll pick up
on June 2nd, three days before departure, formatting TBD. (How can I
keep the block caps without having it be all SHOUTY, I wonder.) See you
on the flip side.

28.May.2016

Pre-holiday news dump

Oh the humanity, irony, comedy, tragedy, all roiled into the figure
of a nasty, orange-haired, small-mouthed, fat-headed clown with weirdly
tiny hands. When I heard that the possibility of a Trump-Sanders debate
was in the works, it seemed like a brilliantly manipulative move.
Sanders has nothing to lose (even if he really doesn't have anything to
win, either) and Trump loves the spotlight.
But
no! Safely in the pile of late-Friday pre-buried news, Trump issued
a
statement that "it seems inappropriate." Inappropriate! A
statement!

Give him credit for finding a polysyllabic adjective for a change.
Shorter epithets are more his wheelhouse, complaining about people and
parties being "crooked" and
"rigged"
against him. Last month, when it still looked like the convention of
his party of convenience might be contested, he was aiming at the
establishment. Having outlasted his sorry opposition on the right, he's
now more fully focused on attacking Hillary Clinton, and what do you
know, the same grab-bag of verbal rocks and rotten fruit work for her.
Or whomever. (No reason to throw them at Sanders—yet—since
the enemy of his enemy is his possible quisling.) He'd be a riot at a
G-7 meeting, wouldn't he? Or a summit with Kim Jong-un.

This shouldn't have been a surprise. The wind-up was there in Trump's
own reality show, along with all the other ooze in the swamp of mass
entertainment. From QVC to PPV cage matches, Fox News to the
Drudge Report, you can get anything you want, and everything you don't
want as well.
One
supporter explained that Trump's "shtick...isn't meant to offend
anyone. He's just communicating." Offense! And insults! Outrage!
Indignation! Derision! But mostly narcissitic personality disorder,
celebrating political incorrectness, and every other form of
incorrectness. We're so tired of being wronged, and told we're wrong.
We want to WIN again (and I don't mean Whip Inflation Now).
Trump gives his believers permission to be RIGHT about
everything, and to care about nothing but themselves. It feels
so good.

Slightly more (but still not too) surprising is the follow-on
parade of cuckolded little men in funny hats who are backing the winning
elephant in front, stepping gingerly to avoid the steaming piles of dung
in its wake. At the top of the month
the
drama was precious. Paul Ryan wasn't ready! (Mitch McConnell was
ever-ready to
go
along to get along from the get-go, same old same old.) Now
Marco
Rubio is all in, because he "respects the process" that delivered
a “con artist” and “the most vulgar person ever to aspire to the presidency”
(as he put it just two months ago) out its rear end. It's an easy step
to convert Obama Derangement Syndrome to Hillary. Stay thirsty, my
friend.

We have all now lived long enough to see that reality can be far stranger
than fiction. The
"Rise
of the Donald" was so far over the top, nobody would fall for it.
"Just TOO BROAD. There may be a taste for a supersize American-cheese
blowhard fantasy compendium of all the ills of Western civilization
poured into one guy, but you need a MUCH lighter touch." The
implausibilities metastasize.

Thanks to WaPo's Amber Phillips for the mention (if not a direct link)
to
this,
from Stephen Colbert, and his Late Show writers' brilliantly
funny line about NH Sen. Kelly Ayotte's squirming:

"She's in some sort of political quantum state... It's like
Schrödinger's Cat, except that she would rather endorse a dead cat than
Donald Trump."

The whole 4½ minute piece from two weeks ago is a treat,
including the escape clause in Ben Carson's ringing endorsement: if
Trump turns out to be a terrible president, hey, it'll only be 4
years. Just after Ayotte's feline conundrum, note the wonderful "omg
did he really ask me that?" pause before Paul Ryan's answer to Jake
Tapper's question, after giving himself a little more time with that
quintessential filler, "to be perfectly candid with you, Jake..."
(Suggested reporter follow-up question the next time this comes up:
"When you say 'to be perfectly candid,' should we assume that when you
don't say that, you're lying to us?" Or Frank. If my name were
Frank, I would pepper what I say with "to be perfectly Frank" just for
fun.)

Did I say that out loud? Already?

Senator Orrin Hatch's opinion piece
(shorter, and cut through the b.s.: Judge Garland is a fine fellow, but
I'm sticking to the party line and won't even consider his nomination)
in the Deseret News would have been utterly unworthy of note,
except for one thing: the bald-faced lie part. Hatch professed his
commitment "to thoughtful consideration" in the absence of having any
such plans.

Ah, but how can I read his mind and know his real intent, you're
wondering? He wrote
his
op-ed about meeting with Garlandbefore he actually had the
meeting. I can't read the mind of the editor who "mistakenly"
published it early, but I'd like to think it was done on purpose, to
show what sort of political hack passes for an elder statesman these
days. Hatch is the longest-serving Republican in the Senate, no
less.

As befits a dapper octogenarian from "the world's greatest deliberative
body," it's a "principled position" Hatch has don't you know, complete
with imagined "decades of established precedent" (which, never mind that
it doesn't exist). He's grasping precedent so firmly, in fact, that he
could envision the meeting ahead of time, and write all about it, save
for those "final revisions and edits" that would have
maintained the pretend sequence of events.

The editor notes the erroneous nature of the publication, and apologizes
to Sen. Hatch and their readers, but really, no apology necessary to us!
Consider it a public service.

"Her bones are lashed together with 6 miles of rope. Her twin wooden
masts are lowered and outstretched only by the power of muscled arms.
And once fully extended, the red, V-shaped sails announce who she is.
..."

She of course sails by skill and memory of sailors, not her own. And
always at the mercy of the sea. Her sailors have employed "wayfinding —
an ancient Polynesian skill that requires memorizing hundreds of stars
and where they rise and set on the ocean horizon" to cross an astounding
26,000 miles of ocean so far.

Even more astounding is the slender thread that connects ancient skill
and memory to this journey, forty years after an ambitious group put
their lives on the lines to show that the ancient myths were almost
certainly true. In the mid-1970s, the story goes,

"[N]o one in Hawaiˋi knew how to build a voyaging canoe — none had existed
for at least 600 years. No one in Hawaiˋi knew how to navigate by the
stars. But they found a man named Mau Piailug in Micronesia, a wayfinder
on a tiny island who agreed to teach them how to sail using cues from
nature — not only by watching the stars, but by noticing the swells and
bird species, and the smallest of details, like shifts in the wind
pressing against their bodies."

By sailing from Hawaiˋi to Tahiti without any modern-day navigational
equipment—a month at sea—they "sparked a revival of Hawaiˋian
identity and culture" for good measure.

"Now they call Hokuleˋa the mother ship because she spawned a new
generation. Since that 1976 voyage, 25 more deep-sea-voyaging canoes
have been birthed across 11 countries. More than 180 crew members have
taken a turn aboard the Hokuleˋa on its global trip. More impressive is
the number who trained, applied but for whom there was no room:
4,000."

This new boat's building and triumph was just about the time I was in
the Hoofers sailing club
at the University of Wisconsin,
learning
the ropes of the Tech dinghy and the rest of its fleet, and taking a
brief turn teaching others how to launch, land, and come about. After
applying what I'd learned to sailing bigger boats in the salt water
around the San Juan islands in Washington and British Columbia, I had my
own notion of sailing around the world (uninformed by this voyage in a
catamaran canoe out in the Pacific) and was headed that way about 1980
when plans changed and the course of my life stayed mostly terrestrial.
(Je ne regrette rien.)

The next leg of the Hokuleˋa's journey after the visit to D.C. is
described differently in the text than on the map, which shows it
turning around short of Maine:

"After New York, the Hokuleˋa will attempt to make it as far north as
Nova Scotia, which, at 50 degrees north of the equator, would mark the
northernmost point she has ever sailed ... [then] will go up the St.
Lawrence to the Great Lakes, then turn back down the East Coast and
across the Panama Canal where she will return to her ocean, the
Pacific. ...

"[The] elder crew members made a deal that this would be their last
voyage. Anyone over age 32 will have to come off the boat as Hokuleˋa
re-enters Polynesia at the last stop before home, in Rapa Nui. There, a
new generation of wayfinders will come onboard and decide where she goes
next."

26.May.2016

Triple Match

If the real Newt Gingrich would stand up, would anyone notice? Maybe the
students in one of the classes he's teaching, if he's still doing that.
But after the 1990s "Contract With America" turned into a
contract on Bill Clinton, and the impeachment debacle (all those
closeted sex offenders outraged at Bill's pecadillos) led to his being
deposed from Speaker of the House, he seemed done for. His revival as a
seeming viable candidate in 2012 was a big surprise, but just the set-up
for 15 minutes of infamy after
yet
another political implosion.

Today's Republican spam-bag has a fundraiser from him, offering to
triple-match my donations. It's under the subject that worked on me to
open the message: "My announcement..." but then disappointed. What
announcement? Nothing I can see in the message other than he wants me to
send money. I have no reason to search the headlines on Newt's behalf.
(Perhaps he's joining the ranks of cuckolded Republicans now professing
support for Donald Trump? Not news.) The email is just a couple of
tired, fact-free talking points, culminating in the punchline that we
cannot afford another Democrat in the White House.

That depends on what the meaning of "afford" is. You can (and should,
please do) argue about causality and every other factor under the sun
about why history is what it is, but
the
record shows that:

"The U.S. economy has performed better when the President of the United
States is a Democrat rather than a Republican, almost regardless of how
one measures performance. For many measures, including real GDP
growth (on which we focus), the performance gap is large and
significant."

"During the 64 years that make up the core 16 terms, real GDP growth
averaged 3.33% at an annual rate. But the average growth rates under
Democratic and Republican presidents were starkly different: 4.33%
and 2.54% respectively. This 1.79 percentage point gap (henceforth,
the “D-R gap”) is astoundingly large relative to the sample mean."

My takeaway is that even with a triple match from who-knows-who, for me
to "pitch in $25, $50, $100 or more" by sending it to the NRSC would be
contrary to my self-interest.

Reflecting on the desert

Not much to add to this link to a post on Viral Forest; check it out.
This
Is What Happens When You Put Rows of Mirrors on a Shack in the
Desert. Attention to a weathered shack in the Joshua Tree, squared
up the corners and... turned it into a remarkable work of art. The still
photos are fabulous, and oh, there's a video, too, that gives you a look
at the "before," the night-time show, what comes between, and the
artist's statement. Wonderful.
The "Lucid Stead"
site has more high-quality stills and video of Phillip K. Smith III's
work.

25.May.2016

Get some hustle on this weekend

Who knew Forbes had an "under 30 network," but yup, and here comes Ryan
Robinson ("serial entrepreneur, content marketer and business coach")
with a guest post on
15
Easy Side Hustles you could start this weekend. If you're a
millennial, so shucks, that leaves me out.

You could start being a Remote English Teacher, for example. Or an
Online Dating Consultant, I bet you'd be good at that. You could learn
how to make beer, pick up a starter kit and get creative. "Start small
by setting up a booth at a local street fair and networking with local
restaurant owners." (Can you make beer in a weekend?) Then see if the
BATF shows up. Maybe buying and selling domain names could be your
thing. Just make something up, buy it for $12 and sell for $16 million.
Or "just under $1,000." Or something. Walk dogs. Write college
admissions essays.

Nothing you like in that list? Here's
a
hundred more, starting with graphic design, web design, web
development, and so on. How hard could it be? Business coaching. Pretty
much anybody could do that.

24.May.2016

Protecting the Owyhee canyonlands in Oregon

The now-more-famous-then-ever Malheur National Wildlife Refuge is in
Harney County, Oregon, not next-door Malheur County. Malheur County is
the SE corner of the state, next to Idaho's SW corner, Owyhee County.
Those three counties are individually and collectively enormous, almost
28,000 square miles together; That's bigger than West Virginia and nine
other states.

What connects them with each other (and northern Nevada) are the vast
river canyonlands cut into the sagebrush steppe, through the recent (a
scant 14 million years old) volcanic rock. The Wildlife Refuge is a
drainage with no way out, Steen's Mountain and surrounding territory
flowing down to Malheur, Harney and Mud lakes, with only the open sky
(and irrigation works) for exit. The
Malheur river
starts in the next basin to the east, flows through Malheur Co. to the
Snake, north of the many-forked Owyhee coming out of Idaho, and
Nevada.

The vast majority of this land was not just made for you and me, we
still own it, together, and manage our shared property with our Bureau
of Land Management, and other federal agencies. But the state boundaries
are in the way. When ranchers and environmentalists and recreationists
of every stripe and land managers and politicians in Idaho were working
to figure out the right kind of protection for this national treasure,
we were talking to people in Oregon and Nevada, who were talking to
their politicians, and so on. But Idaho (et al.) finding its way
forward to an historic
Owyhee Initiative that
included half a million acres of Wilderness, 316 miles of Wild and
Scenic Rivers, the release of 200,000 acres of wilderness study area
and much more (via the
Omnibus
Public Land Management Act of 2009) did not solve the issues in
other states. (130 miles of the Owyhee in Oregon has been
designated Wild
& Scenic.)

But that initiative did show, quite remarkably, that cattlemen (and
women), soil and water conservation districts, farmers,
environmentalists, conservationists, outfitters and guides, off-road
vehicle enthusiasts and the native tribes could work together and agree
on some common ground.

An area larger than Yellowstone National Park with three paved roads
crossing it, Oregon's Owyhee Canyonlands of Malheur County is the
largest undeveloped, unprotected expanse in the lower 48 states.

The area is known for red-rock canyons on the Owyhee River and its
forks, as well as intact sagebrush uplands that are home to a rich array
of wildlife, including native redband trout and one of the largest herds
of California bighorn sheep in the nation.

This is a rugged landscape that doesn't get a lot of visitors, but those
who do visit love the Owyhee for its quite and solitude. Summer can be
blistering hot, winter quite cold. Even the best times of year to visit,
spring and fall, can be challenging because rare rains can turn access
roads into quagmires.

For those who love the desert, all those challenges make the Owyhee just
about perfect.

But my guess is that "the dozen ranchers predict[ing] their grazing
rights would be eliminated if the monument is created" don't have
anything to worry about. As noted, the Monument proposal is vague;
the
proposal from the Campaign for the Owyhee Canyonlands, however, is
quite thoughtful and detailed, and includes preservation of livestock
grazing as it is and private property owners' access and use of their
land. The Obama administration has been quite measured in its use of
Monument designation, and I expect Hillary Clinton's administration to
be so as well.

23.May.2016

Hot enough for you?

"I estimate [a greater than] 99 percent chance of an annual record in
2016," Schmidt wrote
on
Twitter last week, after NASA released its own record climate
readings. A month ago—following the release of February's
data—Schmidt wrote, simply, "Wow."

Since 1980, the world has set a new annual temperature record
approximately every three years, and 15 of the hottest 16 years ever
measured are in the 21st century. ...

Honey, they blew up the House

Here's why anti-Obama fundraising is a more attractive pastime for Paul
Ryan than running the House:
"regular
order" is looking like mayhem. The "not unless it's paid for" trope
popped up to fight against the fight against Zika. Let's impeach the IRS
commissioner! "Then, a gay rights amendment to a spending bill blew up
on the House floor, forcing Republicans to run a last-minute whip
operation to switch a handful of GOP votes and defeat the measure."

"On the one hand, empowering committees and allowing House votes on even
controversial amendments affords lawmakers more independence and leeway
to advance their own ideas, promoting good will. But it also means tough
votes that can embarrass the party or trip-up lawmakers trying to
survive re-elections in November."

I know, let's have some votes on the Confederate flag.

"Uber of X" is not a compliment

Having never Uber'd, I can only guess at its pleasures and discontents.
It's like a cab, only whizzier to call it, and cheaper (maybe), and the
driver gets less money, and they're probably skirting regulations where
they can get away with it. Right?

Vince
Kuraitis deconstructs the Uber business model
and outlines its swashbuckling dubiosity. Of course the valuation is
inflated, we're used to that in new, new things, but Medieval platform
governance, not so much. Looking at it from the perspective of possible
challengers in the healthcare field, a defensive posture is
understandable. “Uber's 'ask questions later' approach to regulation
is particularly unsuited to healthcare. People’s safety and their
lives are at risk.”

From Spacewars to Whole Earth to the future

Twenty years ago, when the world wide web was just kicking into high
gear, I was an enthusiastic early adopter among my peers in a big
technology company. We all had been using computers in our jobs in lots
of ways, but the memorandum was still in the ruling class of
correspondence. There was plenty of email too (some carrying memos), but
those messages were not as powerful as paper, multiple copies printed
and distributed into mailstop folders. Important communication had to be
on paper.

And now, well, you can't hardly explain this to anybody, because we all
swim in it, all the time, every day. Except
in
Detroit, and a lot of places like it, where the "digital divide" is
an enormous gulf, spanned by tenuous and rickety bridges at best.
That NYT story made me think we need the equivalent of
the Rural
Electrification Agency for our depressed urban centers.
Wikipedia's REA page says that in 1925, just over 3% of the more than 6
million farms in the U.S. had electric power from the grid.
With broadband "now considered as basic as electricity and water," a
quarter million residents of Detroit don't have it.

Here where we generally take our connectivity and all things web for
granted, we can wander through our past and consider our future. The
Guardian had a nice feature by Carole Cadwalladr about big idea guy
Stewart Brand and his pre-web brainchild that looks like the web in
print, now that we see it in the rear view mirror:
the
Whole Earth Catalog. Brand is now 77, which doesn't seem nearly as
old as it used to. For all his Zelig-like presence in the history of
technology, it seems like he'd have to be more like 177 by now.
Brand was 20-something, and
The
Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test came out the same year as the
"mother of all demos,"

"when the world first saw what computers could do. Douglas Englebart
astonished the 1,000 foremost computer scientists with the first
computer mouse, the first teleconferencing, the first word processing,
and the first interactive computing. (Being Stewart Brand, of course, he
wasn't just there, he was operating the camera and consulting on the
presentation.)"

Thirty years after that demo, I tapped into a colloquium at Stanford
(via the web, of course), with Englebart, on the topic of his
Unfinished
Revolution, and now almost twenty more years later (where does the
time go?), I'm looking at my notes, and trying to update the URLs. After
trying to guess what (if any) credentials I might still have with
Stanford, I noticed the target under the "Free Stuff" menu of the Center
for Professional Development,
Engelbart
Colloquium at Stanford, which currently has an homage to the
1990s-era web and laugh-out-loud irony: "This page is under
construction." (Along the way, one of the error pages also suggested
that "If you are using an AOL browser you may not be able to gain access.
Please try an alternative browser such as Microsoft Internet
Explorer.")

As Brand looks back, he concludes the '60s produced at least one good
thing: The Grateful Dead: "Communes failed, drugs went nowhere, free
love led pretty directly to AIDS. A lot of people thought Mao Tse-tung
was a hero. Domes leaked. Graphic art was dreadful, except for Andy
Warhol and Robert Crumb. The rest was basically tie-dye. ..."
From
the
Rolling Stone's 40th anniversary interviews.

"If, in your office, you as an intellectual worker, were supplied with a
computer display, backed up by a computer that was alive for you all
day, and was instantly responsible... responsive... instantly responsive
to every action you had, how much value could you derive from that?"

Watching Englebart's machine-like delivery of those ideas that were
pretty much mind-blowing at the time, particularly to those prepared to
understand and expand upon them, I thought of Arther C. Clarke's and
Stanley Kubrick's
2001: A
Space Odyssey, which, wouldn't you know it, came out in 1968,
too.

If I searched a bit more, I could probably turn up video of the
day-long symposium in 1998, but I've got the notes I published on HP's
intranet when they were fresh. 30 years on, asked (by Brand) if he knew
how well his presentation was going over, Englebart said he couldn't
tell, and that he was too worried about whether it was going to crash.
The standing ovation "knocked me off my feet," he said.

The moderator, Paul Saffo, had set the context of the ACIS meeting by
saying "The Dead played at Winterland a few nights ago, and
Inagaddadavida is the hit song on the radio." It was the days of
computer code on punch cards.

The first panelists were
Stewart
Brand;
Jeff
Rulifson
(director of
technology group at Sun, previously at SRI, Rolm, Xerox PARC);
Charles
Irby
("former Englelbart collaborator" at SRI, Xerox, Metaphor Computer
Systems, General Magic, SGI of the Nintendo 64);
Bill
English (another collaborator and "the sort of engineer who can make
anything work") and Englebart.

Responding to the question of What was "it," the essential message of
the demo?, Brand went back to the observation he'd made after seeing
young men playing Spacewar! at Stanford in the early 60s, and
said it was the first inkling that computers could increase human
capability, rather than just humans increasing computer
capability. From The Guardian's piece (which I just noticed was
published in 2013):

"It wasn't until 1972 that Brand wrote about [seeing Spacewar!
played], and he still wrote about it before anyone else, in Rolling
Stone magazine, an article that is so prophetic, it's almost
hallucinatory. Brand's revelation, that he understood before almost
anyone else, was that cyberspace was some sort of fourth dimension and
the possibilities were both empowering and limitless."

Sadly, the 1972
Coverwall shows me that Brand's was not among the 13 articles
Rolling Stone thinks were prophetic enough to put online.
Happily, the web as a whole rarely misses or forgets. Wheels.org has it,
complete with (badly scanned versions of) the photos taken by
Annie Leibovitz when she was 23:
Spacewar.

22.May.2016

Interesting notion

There was an old VW camper bus parked on a nearby street the other day,
and as I rode by on my bike, I saw a FOR SALE sign in the window.
That brought back fond memories of the '65 not-camper bus I bought a
million years ago and had made-shift into a campmobile of sorts.
Fondness was all about oh, the places we did go, and not about the
lack of a decent heater, the gutless engine tucked in the rear, the
transmission that leaked dry and had to be filled with a helper, tubing,
funnel, 17mm allen wrench and me on the ground underneath the blasted
thing. Teaching my girlfriend how to drive a manual transmission was
between the fond and unfond; it was rewarding in the long run, but for
the short run it was hard to listen to the gears being ground.

Some time later I came back the other way and slowed down to see one
particular, the $15,000 (I think it was) asking price. Whaaa?! That was
that, until a couple days later, I saw another one, looking
cherry (if "safety orange" can said to be cherry) and on offer, down
another nearby street. After smiling by on the roll, I circled back,
stopped and checked it out. The "Campmobile" has a freshly rebuilt 1.7
liter engine, a heater/defroster (which you'd only think would go
without saying if you've never had one of these), AM/FM/CD, retractable
seat belts and stuff. 1974. $16,500 / OBO. A couple Grateful Dead
stickers pre-installed.

Send someone a message (literally)

This just in from "Team Ryan"...

"President Obama swore an oath TWICE to uphold and protect the
Constitution.

"And yet his signature health care law violated the Constitution by
granting spending power to the Executive branch.

"To remind him of the oath he swore, we asked you to chip in so we could
send him a copy of the Constitution. ..."

All I can say is, after all the crap you've pulled in the House, Paul
Ryan, you ignorant slut.

21.May.2016

Tales of customer service

As careful readers will have noticed, I've been
in the Amazon Affiliates program
since before the blog started, back when the web was still shiny
and new. (They lowered the mimimum payment below $100 a long time ago,
and I have collected a handful of $10-20 payments over the decade
and a half; don't think I've cleared $100 yet, but halfway there, for
sure.)

This site is most unlike the rest of the wild world web where yes you
have noticed pretty much every site now has a jamboree of scripting to
track your every move and auction off your eyeballs "real-time" to
advertisers eager to throw images, video, and the kitchen sink at you to
get you to buy, buy, buy. In the last several months, this jamboree has
started to break things where we live, cross-site and cross-server
buggery that has taken to hanging Firefox multiple times a day.
(ctrl-alt-del and Task Manager's END THIS PROCESS has become a good
friend. I start by killing Flash, and that fixes a good third of the
problems; the rest go away when Firefox does.)

But anyway, I just wanted to set the context for talking about Amazon,
customer service and recent experience. In their reply to feedback I sent
by email, I noted the tagline that my "feedback is helping [them] build
Earth's Most Customer-Centric Company." I'd somewhat idly fed back the
observation that niggling about shipping options on a big order I'd just
placed seemed sort of silly. For my part, I could've gone ahead and paid
another $5 or $7 for expediting, but I've been well-trained to want
"free" (even when it obviously isn't free, but buried in the transaction
as a whole). But for an order this big...

Their response was fantastic: they expedited the shipping without me
asking (exactly) or expecting it. The response was quick and the change
to "next day" happened, as promised, superceding what I'd
specified/accepted for the order ("next week, probably"). When
the stuff arrived (two separate shipments, oddly, the two-item "bundle"
mysteriously unbundled for their convenience, and
inefficiently in the big picture, with two trucks coming out to our
house on the same day), opportunity #2 arose: I realized that I had
ordered (and now received) something different from what I
thought I was ordering.

It was all my mistake, and they might have said "oh, sorry, but
we sent you what you'd ordered" in a polite way, as unsatisfying as that
would have been. But I'd reviewed their return/exchange policy, and it
seemed sensible to exchange one piece for another, and effectively
change my "bundle" to the one I'd meant to order, for the same price,
and just the inconvenience (for both of us) of more shipping and the
cost and delay involved.

I replied (again) to the original customer service email they'd sent,
and they picked up the correspondence quickly. "Per the policy,"
they said, "we are not able exchange the item."

In this case I´ve two options for you as mentioned below:
1) You can return the item for full refund.
2) You can return the item for replacement for same item.

Option #2 is nonsensical, given the facts. Option #1... could be
expanded to have me go ahead and return the whole order for a
full refund, and place a new order for what I wanted in the first place,
but it would entail shipping back the larger, more expensive item that
was exactly what I wanted, in "exchange" for the exact same
thing.

Reconsidering all that, and including the time value of happiness in
ownership (and discounting the extended pleasure of anticipation; it's
just not the same the second time around), I decided to buy a
third item to augment the first two, and make a larger "bundle" of
my own. From my point of view, I'll end up better off, and I can start
enjoying my new product today instead of blah blah blah.

At the bottom of the Message From Customer Service, there is a formlet
with the single question: Did I solve your problem?
and two choice buttons, Yes, or No. There is no "not exactly," and no
"yes AND no," etc. Keep it simple.

The Empty Chair: The Most Important Person in the Room
(Um, what? "Early on, Bezos brought an empty chair into meetings and
informed his top executives that they should consider that seat occupied
by their customer, 'the most important person in the room.'" Cute.)

Never Settle for 99%

Respect Today’s Customer

Strive to Create a Customer-Centric Company

Don’t Be Afraid to Apologize

So how did they do against their own measures? In the first round, with
the expedited shipping, they turned a failure into a win, pretty much
across the board. If they're smart, they could "think beyond the fix"
with #6, and set a new threshold beyond $25 or whatever it is to
make free (but slow) shipping available, one where they'll expedite
shipping for free on orders over $200, or $500, or whatever makes sense,
with no questions asked.

In the second round, it was #1 fail, #2 fail, #3 irrelevant, #4 fail, #5
meh, #6 fail, #7 fail. But their residual good will, the breadth of
their offerings and network (I bought the 3rd item "used/like new" from
one of their partner vendors for half-retail, with the assurance of
"Amazon fullfillment" to save me the trouble of dealing with a new-to-me
vendor) carried them past the failure well enough.

There's an odd dog whistle about his bucking the trend of conservatives
suspicious of silicon valley. Beck wonders, but can't answer why
innovators and disruptors are liberal, but (at least?) "they're not
Progessives, at least not the folks I met with today (though I’m sure
there were a few)." It reads like "at least they're not the bogeymen we
imagine and hate so much," but he didn't say that, exactly.

What Beck and others on the right don't seem to understand is that it is
the nature of liberal thought to be more open to considering others'
opinions and new ideas. It's BY DEFINITION eh, even if none of us ever
live up to any ideal, and in spite of the polarized mode of thought that
leads to demonization of liberals (and big or little p progressives) as
being intolerant, because they don't or won't accept x, y or z.
The good news is, we don't live down to the ridiculous stereotypes, any
more than "conservatives" as a group do.

The truth, I think, is that conservative thought (again, by definition)
tends to hold up RESISTANCE TO CHANGE as a virtue. If what you believe is
virtuous, holding fast to to it is a good thing. But resistance to
change is not a virtue all by itself, any more than willingness to
change is. You don't want your mind to be so open that your brain
falls out, but in order to learn anything, you have to change your
mind. Literally.

The other massive point that he and many others who are complaining
about its supposed biases don't seem to have stumbled upon is that
Facebook is a BUSINESS, first of all, and an utterly unique, gigantic,
and rapidly evolving leader of the "social media" that is not
the same as what he (or any of us) imagines "main stream media" to be or
what it ever was or will be, and not the same as the mainstream
infotainment businesses masquerading as "news media" that he's leveraged
so well in his own career. It's a market-based solution to the needs and
wants of let's just round up to 2 billion individuals, and the
myriad businesses and organizations that want to reach them for their
own reasons.

Beck's own punchline is that he was disturbed by conservatives getting
out the torches and pitchforks at the drop of a hat, and coming
up with a crazy grab-bag of things they think Facebook ought to do to
placate them. Yes, that's disturbing.

"I sat there looking around and heard things like:

"1) Facebook has a very liberal workforce. Has Facebook considered
diversity in their hiring practice? The country is 2% Mormon. Maybe
Facebook’s company should better reflect that reality.

"2) Maybe Facebook should consider a six-month training program to help
their biased and liberal workforce understand and respect conservative
opinions and values.

"3) We need to see strong and specific steps to right this wrong.

"It was like affirmative action for conservatives. When did
conservatives start demanding quotas AND diversity training AND less
people from Ivy League Colleges."

"The overall tenor," Beck said, "felt like the Salem Witch Trial:
‘Facebook, you must admit that you are screwing us, because if not, it
proves you are screwing us.’"

With the... free-to-all-comers platform they've built, and are now
monetizing to customers willing to pay to get attention from the huge
community of users. If you don't like it of course, you're free to not
buy advertising from them, or even not use it. (There's always Google+,
right?) And it's a free country, you can still complain about what (you
think) they're doing either way. And we're free to think what we like
about you when you express your opinions.

You can talk to the animals

and to your house, and personal digital assistant, so I hear, and will
soon have some sort of choice, between Apple's thingie, and Amazon's
Echo, and real soon now,
Google
Home. The (web) headline is about the clash of the titans; the URL
touts "a smart speaker with a search giant for a brain." Said speaker is
short of "many important details, including a price tag," and scheduled
for release this fall, impossibly far away. But when it does come out,
you'll notice "the top of Home is slanted downward, whereas Echo’s top
is flat" and stuff. Also, "Google is allowing consumers to choose from
different colors for the bottom part of Home, while Echo comes only in
black."

Home décor is a big business, so don't underestimate color! Of course,
the brains are "most important," right? Google inside versus Alexa,
whoever she is. And oh, there are "voice commands that already work with
Google’s assistant" I didn't know about, and they'll work with Google
Home. We are soooo behind the times.

The test results gave an edge to Google, but we won't know about the
canonical virtual assistant tasks—ordering pizza, setting your
Internet-connected thermostat, and controlling smart light
bulbs—until we find out whether "Google persuades third-party
developers to create tasks that work" with their thing. Like, who would
want to spend any time writing sortware that would integrate with the
8,000 pound gorilla of the internet? (As for smart light bulbs... if
they're so blasted smart, why don't they control themselves?)

The NYT long-distance preview notes one thing that might hold teh Goog
back: its assistant "lack(s) a friendly name like Siri or Alexa." You
summon the daemon by just saying "Google."

Google me this, Einstein: 32 years after 1984, are we all sanguine with
our prospects and faith that Apple, Google and Amazon won't be evil?
Inviting them into our homes and taking them on as our personal
assistants who will quickly enough know more about us than we know
ourselves, what could possibly go wrong?

Missed it by *that* much

I've got May 22d stuck in my mind, but I see (once again) that it was
May 14, 2000
when I lit up what's become this fortboise blog. The dot-com bubble was
full-on (and starting to pop), we were temporary relocated to paradise
in Palo Alto, irises were blooming in Boise, and opting out of ad
attacks was a thing.

Sixteen years and a week, then.

18.May.2016

In eastern Washington, mountain climbs you

Thirty-six years ago today, in the course of a few moments on a Sunday
morning, Mt. St. Helens rearranged local landscaping, scattering itself
across eastern Washington, northern Idaho, and beyond. I was a witness
to the cataclysm, driving toward, under and then into the ashfall
that blotted out the sun in the middle of the day. I started the day in
a place you might not be able to find on a map anymore, let alone on the
ground, named (more appropriately than I could've guessed when the rides
ran out and I settled in for Saturday night by the side of the road less
traveled) "Dusty." About that time of the morning, with my first (and
only) ride of the day, stopping at Othello, the driver brought me out of
the gas and groc to show me the "big storm" coming.

One look at the wall of cloud in the distance told me what had
happened, without a doubt. That was not water headed our way. "Mount
St. Helens blew up." Whatever else I had to say after that doesn't stick
in the mind. We drove on, wide-eyed.

The volcano had been simmering and threatening for two months, and was a
regular topic in the news, but very few of us in the range of the
Cascades actually knew what a major eruption would mean. As the "day"
along my westbound route went to blackest night, back to gray twilight
in the midafternoon, and back to black before a little bit of color in
the sunset, I had my firsthand experience, extended by being forced to
stay overnight in Ellensburg. The state patrol had closed the highways,
without regard to the fact that we were no more than ten miles from the
western edge of the ash. No one knew what would happen next.

Thanks to the magic of Twitter and the web, today's anniversary brought
a remembrance from a reporter for The Oregonian back in the day
(and still!), Les Zaitz. It was posted two years ago, but reading it
today brought a thrill just as well. Along with the story of
a
young reporter getting his byline on the front page, there's a high
(enough) resolution image of the May 19, 1980 front page, mostly filled
with the towering ash cloud, viewed from the "clean" side. Black ink on
newsprint is the perfect medium for a photo of the event. I guess I
didn't have a camera with me... but would have had only an hour or two to
photograph anything in any case. Bad lighting, most of the day. We do
have a glossy copy of Don Wilson's quintessential photo that ran on that
front page, on a glossy postcard.

The story has a handful of links in its sidebar, including ones about
the latest swarm of earthquakes and the unliklihood of there being
another big eruption imminent. But you never know. The
article
from last November has more beautiful, recent photos of the mountain
and other Cascades volcanoes.

"[W]e were basically acting like pundits, but attaching numbers to our
estimates. And we succumbed to some of the same biases that pundits
often suffer, such as not changing our minds quickly enough in the face
of new evidence. Without a model as a fortification, we found ourselves
rambling around the countryside like all the other pundit-barbarians,
randomly setting fire to things."

I was reading on through the five sections of analysis and when he
mentioned the complexity that resulted in Howard Dean losing big in
2004, even though "he might have become the nominee" if he'd held on to
win Iowa, I thought "chaos theory." Two sentences later: "The primaries
may literally be
chaotic, in the sense that chaos theory is defined."

A model can be better than pundits full of opinions, but forecasts
may be just as hard with or without a model. The map a model might
provide is never the territory.

After he dips into Bayes' theorem and a nice explanation of prediction
following a "uniform prior," he backs off, saying "we've gotten pretty
abstract," but no complaints from me. I love Silver's nerdiness,
introspection, and desire for improvement. Continuous improvement means
continually changing your mind; no wonder we see so little of it.

"Basically, my view is that putting Trump’s chances at 2 percent or 5
percent was too low, but having him at (for instance) 10 percent or 15
percent, where we might have wound up if we’d developed a model or
thought about the problem more rigorously, would have been entirely
appropriate. If you care about that sort of distinction, you’ve come to
the right website!"

Fascinating read.

The answer is "no."

It hasn't been huge in the news, but I'm getting fundraising spun off
both sides of the recent Supreme Court decision on the Affordable Care
Act. "Team Ryan," declaring itself "a joint fundraising committee
authorized by and composed of Ryan for Congress, Inc., Prosperity
Action, Inc., and the NRCC" (National Republican Congressional
Committee) sent me one today, "signed" by Speaker of the House, Paul
Ryan, under the subject "Should Obamacare be repealed?" And the body,
under quote of the day from President Obama, "So sue me":

President Obama taunted conservatives when we expressed concern over his
executive overreach. And when we sued him in federal court to protect
the Constitution’s separation of powers, President Obama called it “a
stunt.”

Now President Obama is eating his words.

Last Thursday, a federal judge ruled that Obamacare violates the
Constitution by granting spending power to the Executive branch.

Thomas, I need to know if you stand with me in the fight to repeal
Obamacare.

Ryan's a smart guy and an adept political hack. He knows as well as we
would, if we'd bothered to dig into the less-than-headline news about
a
"victory" against the Affordable Care Act that the ruling was
immediately stayed, and will certainly be appealed. Lo and behold, the
"old-fashioned strategy" of "throw everything against the wall and see
what sticks" found something that could, two years later. Two more
years, we might even have it scraped off and the wall repainted.
(Blue's a nice color.)

Send more money and we can have more of this exciting political theater!
Don't you want to poke your thumb in your own eye some more?

"Republicans are rejoicing," Russell Berman reports for
The Atlantic, at their tentative success preventing the executive
branch from reducing the cost of co-payments, deductibles, and other costs
for low-income people. (The other half of this particular lawsuit, to
try to get the Obama administration to implement the ACA faster
had already been thrown out of court, to the disappointment of fans of
irony.) Truly, cause for celebration of the rule of law.

To envision how brilliantly House of Representatives v. Burwell
might one day turn out, we can look to
this
week's unanimous "decision" from our 89% SCOTUS to punt a
mind-numbingly insignificant interpretation of the horrifically bad
Religious Freedom Restoration Act, after varying decisions by the U.S.
Courts of Appeals for the 3rd, 5th, 10th and D.C. Circuits, back to the
four circuits for reconsideration. The chances the lower courts will
agree on the second try and settle
Zubik
v. Burwell don't seem that great, by simple probability if
nothing else. Some while later, it'll be back. Maybe we'll have a 100%
and non-lame
duck SCOTUS when it does, who knows?

As Tierney Sneed put it
for
Talking Points Memo, the unanimous message was "everyone is
just going to need to get along and keep the Supreme Court out of it."
It's almost as if the high court wants to mimic Paul Ryan's House of
Representatives in its incapacity to do anything useful. A mere "stunt"
or three would be a vast improvement over the quagmire the Republicans
have constructed for government to slog around in.

17.May.2016

That was interesting

It's primary election day in Idaho today, and nothing to do with the
Presidential race, but everything to do with contested state
legislature races, precinct committee positions and judges.
Having considered my options with aforethought, I had no reason to
change my party registration (Republican, thanks to the right-wing
partisans who insisted on closed primaries to try to amplify the
polarization in the state), but planned on voting Democratic.

The usual gantlet of nice old ladies who dispense the ballots, one who
said "I need to see a photo ID," and I thought
"or have you fill out
an affidavit of identity" which I didn't care to bother with this
time. The ballot-dispenser was working ahead, and had looked at the
sign-in sheet to see my (R), and handed me a ballot without asking my
preference.

"I'd like a Democratic ballot," I said, cheerfully, and loud
enough for everyone in the not-crowded room to hear. "But you're
registered as Republican," one replied, "and it's too late to
change." She held up her laminated decision-making flow chart with
circles and arrows. I didn't make an attempt to decipher what it
purported to say. I knew that it was my right and privilege as a
®egistered ®epublican to get any damn ballot I wanted, or at
least any of the Republican, Democratic, or nonpartisan ones. Gosh, our
Secretary of State's
Citizen's Guide
just says "You may be required to register as a member of
specific political party in order to vote in that party’s Primary
Election" without bothering to include specifics about the four
recognized parties it enumerates. Things might change, and nobody in the
office knows how to edit the document? Ah, here it is:
Party
Affiliation and Ballot Choice, very clear and direct and dated for
today. Four choices (because there isn't a Libertarian ballot this time),
two permissive, and two exclusive. Maybe they could have laminated
up that information and had it at the polls instead of the
circles and arrows thing. But back to our story.

"Nevertheless, I'd like a Democratic ballot, and I'm sure the Democrats
are OK with that," I said.

They thought they were running this process, but my take-charge
insistence set them back a bit, and prompted them to re-check the
flow chart, now apparently reading it for comprehension for the first
time. It's not like we haven't had at least half a dozen
elections since the Republicans insisted on having the law
their way. And these are mostly all the same nice ladies who run
the polls at our precinct every time. What the hell?

Had I been interested in comic effect, I would have unzipped my fleece
vest and exposed my 1.20.2009 t-shirt with Barack Obama's likeness on
it and said "the President says I can have a Democratic ballot if I want
one, 'k?" But they figured out their own instructions and
acknowledged that what do you know, I was correct, and gave me the
ballot I asked for, without the need for further showmanship.

The other noticeable change at Leisure Villa (where time seems to be
standing quite still, otherwise) was that they had an optical ballot
scanner next to the exit table, for voters to submit their ballots
directly for tallying, instead of putting them in a box that would be
carried off and counted elsewhere, out of sight. Probably some added
expense to have at least one of those in every polling place, but an
obvious improvement to have things counted on the spot, as they're cast.
(Even better would have been for it to show me—with suitable
privacy—what all it scanned and have me hit a VERIFY button, or
REJECT it as a miscount. Hmm, would it reject a spoiled ballot on the
spot and give another chance? I'm told by someone who saw it happen that
it would.)

Anyway, technology, and partisanship marching together into the
future.

Fighting in the streets

Back in the day, I went to a couple or three state party conventions,
and found the experience interesting, instructive, a bit expensive
(volunteers all pay their own way), and... rather tedious. That was when
the intricasies of Robert's Rules of Order were an undiscovered country,
along with the motivation for fine-tuning the language of platform
phrasing and planks.

For a while this year, it looked like a lot of states' conventions and
the national conventions would be very interesting, but the
chance of indecision lasting all the way to July has waned to nil.
At least for all observers outside Bernie Sanders' campaign. For
Bernie's supporters, hope is still alive, and that hope included the
possibility of working the Nevada state convention for a few more
delegates than the February caucus had earned. (Not that that could
change the ultimate outcome, but working toward it, and for what
you believe.)

On the one hand, it might have been party politics as usual, ardent
supporters doing all they could to network and bring others into the
fold, working behind the scenes to meet arcane requirements.
On the other... well, it devolved into rather epic chaos, and the
first-person accounts have been flying follow-on after the fact.
First I heard (when a Berner's social media thread and the question "did
you hear what happened?" prompted me to go look), in an account
in
the Washington Post, it sounded like the Sanders people had
tried to manipulate the system in their favor, and contrary to the
caucus results, maybe within the rules or maybe not, and they'd been
stymied. It also sounded like, hoo boy, if Hillary's campaign had
done what Bernie's was said to have, there would have been howling and
rending of garments in outrage.

I've seen the difference between first hand accounts from people in the
thick of things and media reports at a distance. Reporters never get
everything right, because that's not possible, but I assume they get
closer to what happened than random individuals, and specific
participants. The context, at least:

"Although Hillary Clinton won the Nevada caucuses in February, the
Sanders campaign worked hard to win delegates at county conventions and
was hopeful that it could emerge from the state with an equal number of
delegates or more. But the state convention, held at the Paris Las Vegas
Hotel, deteriorated into chaos after nearly 60 of Mr. Sanders’s
potential delegates were deemed ineligible amid a dispute over the
rules. The convention concluded abruptly after security staff no longer
felt it could ensure the safety of the participants, many of whom were
yelling and throwing things."

Rules of Order only go so far in controlling a mob.

"Mr. Sanders faces a virtually insurmountable delegate deficit, but has
pledged to carry on his campaign despite the long odds."

I can understand the motivation, the not giving up, after all these
years, and this time coming closer than ever. But man,
you fell short, you didn't get it, you're not going to get it,
and it's all downside from here. No matter how heartfelt your belief in
all your principles. If you chuck off the democratic principle
(and yes, the rules that are sometimes byzantine and seem stacked
against you), the rest won't mean very much. Nor does this statement put
any shine on the situation:

“The senator believes that the Democratic Party all over the country
would serve its own interests better if it were to figure out a way to
welcome people who have been energized and excited by his campaign into
the party. It would behoove the party to be more welcoming and engage
those people.”

Behoove. It would behoove the senator and his sort-of adopted party to
be part of the solution figuring out a way to keep his supports
enaged and energized for the party even after his now inevitable
loss in the primaries. It would be behoove Sanders-nauts to think a bit
further than next week or next month and consider what trying to blow up
the Democratic Party will do for the change they hope to bring. I know
some of them think a President Trump would be a catalyst to the
revolution they want to see, rather like fundamentalist evangelicals
look forward to great battles bringing on Armageddon, so yay for
that.

In the more ordinary tranche of the electorate, and among the citizens
who will suffer the consequences, I am not feeling the Bern here.

Update:Jeff
Stein's explainer for Vox covers the facts in more detail. The one
that stands out to me was how low the stakes were that prompted an ugly
fight. There just isn't a lot of upside for the Democratic Party to have
more of this.

16.May.16

Regional cray cray: up and to the right

The idea of the Pacific Northwest-ish being a survivalist redoubt is not
exactly new. There were whiffs of it 40 years ago, when I moved from the
midwest to north Idaho to attend the University of Idaho. Post-Viet Nam,
post-Nixon, mid-energy crisis, mid-extreme inflation, mid-mutually
assured destruction standoff with the Soviet Union, the idea of economic
collapse and societal breakdown did not seem that far away.

Who can say if it's closer or farther away today? I'm biased by all
these years of it not happening, and expecting we'll muddle along,
somehow. We survived Ronald Reagan and his cock-eyed "environmentalism"
and "supply-side economics." We survived 3 progessively deteriorating
terms of Bush. (And "they" survived two terms of Clinton, near
enough.)

Last week, a special message from one of CHQ's advertisers came through,
under the scare subject, "Obamas’ new law threatens all US citizens
with this type of IRA/401k..." and with warnings from an
unidentified "former U.S. Congressman" about the "INEVITABLE" currency
collapse this summer, and how the crisis "WILL Cause Federal Gov't to
tarket 401k's & IRA's for additional revenue." The dollar is "on its
last days," don't you know, "as China prepares with this big
announcement." And most... ominous? motivational? informational? of
all,

Trump bashes Fed, endorses Gold Standard.

The click-through I did not have the temerity to follow was for my own
personal Gov't Debt Survival Guide, which I gather has a lot to
do with Gold. "IRS Loophole allows you to store your IRA at Home." Let's
hope it's in gold, guns, and ammo, right? (All that gold under the
mattress, you damn well better be locked and loaded.)

Back in the day, you didn't need to worry too much about sorting out the
hippy Mother Earth News types from the "survivalists"; the latter were
fewer and as far between as they could manage, while the former tended
to cluster together, and share their pot...s and stuff. From my point of
view, the survivalist whack-jobs were more like Sasquatch than an
invasive species: shadowy figures you imagine shuffling near the
treeline, but can't quite bring into focus, or convince yourself are
real.

These decades later, with the planet's population almost doubled,
there's a lot more outward pressure on sociopaths and the mildly
antisocial alike. Two terms of Obama and the resulting derangement
syndrome, on top of that pert-near global financial collapse at the end
of Bush II-b has given us a new wave of survivalism, and new vocabulary
to boot. Not to be confused with the adorable "preppie," we now have
"preppers," those preparing for the apocalypse, essentially, and as
Betsy
Russell reports for the Spokesman-Review, they're "fleeing
more populated states" and looking to our neighborhood as a "redoubt,"
"a place to settle and defend themselves when the whole country goes
bad."

While we wait for that to happen, "there goes the neighborhood," eh.

The possibly good news is that for as much attention as these people are
capable of drawing to themselves, there really aren't that many of them.
A few dozen go a long way, but compared to what?

Longtime Bonners Ferry businessman and former Mayor Darrell Kerby said
he’s only encountered about 30 [people who responded to the 5-years-ago
call from "survivalist author and blogger James Wesley Rawles"]. But he
notes that Boundary County, with its dramatic river and mountain
scenery, has a population of just 11,000 – “and that includes cats and
dogs.”

District 1 includes all of sparsely-populated Boundary County, and most
of Bonner County to the south, with population 8,000-ish Sandpoint in
it, to reach the equal population apportionment. Sandpoint still has
some hippy resort/ski-town feel, what with Idaho's biggest lake, and 25
feet of snow in the average
winter.
But the top-of-the-state has two "ultraconservative" state
legislators in our House, Heather Scott out of Ohio, and now in
Blanchard; and Sage Dixon out of California, and now in Ponderay, along
with the state’s longest-serving senator and now co-chair of the joint
budget committee, Shawn Keough. Never mind that Keough is part of the
Republican super-majority; her antagonists see a bogeyman in anyone too
close to "establishment." A Palouse area blogger styling himself the
"Bard of the American Redoubt" is sputtering so hard the adjectives
cover as much turf as those applied to our feckless tyrant in chief:

[Alex] Barron slammed Keough as a “liberal authoritarian progressive”
and accused her of “gun grabbing” and wanting to “tax more so she can
spend more on her socialists, pro-homosexual union allies working in
governmental schools.”

It doesn't have to make sense, or have any connection to reality.
What's important is that they find
"a patriot man or woman" to replace her. Keough has been elected 10
times, and is the executive director of Associated Logging Contractors
in her regular job. Her far-right opposition for tomorrow's primary
(not counting the faux-Democrats who've snuck in) claims his
territory as "conservative constitutional Republican," as if it were his
alone. (None of the "constitutional" types seem to recognize the
centrality of
public
education in Idaho's Constitution, somehow.) He's lived in Priest
River for... slightly longer than Keough has been in the Legislature,
and just got a notion to run because the direction the country's going,
and stuff.

The poster girl of the Redoubtables, Heather Scott, loves to wave her
Confederate battle flag, and celebrate the "ton" of new arrivals (at 250
pounds apiece, that might be only 8, but she claims "probably 50 or
60"), from "all over." She's an A-plus voter by the Idaho Freedom
Foundation's mindless anti-government index (vs. Dixon's slightly
disappointing A-minus), and can rightly claim a good share of
responsibility for buggering the end of the 2015 legislation and driving
an expensive special session to accomplish what might have been business
as usual.

Russell rounded up another quintessential spokesperson for Teh Crazy:
Don Bradway, late of California (“what I call the occupied zone”) which
must be mightly pleased to see the back of him.

“I make no bones about the fact I’m a conservative Christian and I like
being around other people who think the way I do,” he said. Bradway, who
is retired, estimated he’s met easily 100 other new arrivals who
followed the same path, including many from California. He’s active in
local politics, as are many, and was elected to the Kootenai County
Republican Central Committee.

“I know there are a goodly number of folks who are able to retire, or
self-employed, or come up here and try to find a job,” he said. He said
California is “swirling around the drain of liberty.”

Bradway is convinced that a looming disaster, whether it’s a major
earthquake or a financial collapse, will turn America’s cities into
“just a mass of chaos,” with rioting and anarchy. “I know people who’ve
said, ‘I’m looking for something that’s defensible, if the teeming
hordes come surging out of Spokane,’” Bradway said.

These are people for whom the idea of a "proper role of government"
seems an oxymoron. "A system of common schools, safe roads,
infrastructure like sewer, water and now Internet" are a bridge too
far.

Just to be clear: while we do have our share (or perhaps more
than our share) of this particular brand of sociopathy, they are still
a small and rather unwelcome minority to most of us in the great state
of Idaho. I can't speak as knowledgeably about the rest of the
broadly-brushed (and sparsely populated) region of (all of!) Montana,
Wyoming, eastern Washington and Oregon, but beyond the scattered
enclaves, I dare say the vast majority of the inhabitants are more
normal, and more decent people in this region.

14.May.2016

New worlds

From a comparatively small patch of sky, the latest batch of planets
confirmed in other solar systems by data and analysis from
NASA's
Kepler mission brings the total to more than 2,000. From the NYT's
report this week (with my emphasis):

"So far, two dozen of the planets found and confirmed by Kepler occupy
the so-called Goldilocks zones of their stars where liquid water and
perhaps “Life as We Think We Know It” could exist.

"Extrapolating these results to the entire galaxy, Natalie Batalha,
Kepler mission scientist from the Ames Research Center, said there
could be 10 billion roughly Earth-size planets in the galaxy within
their stars’ habitable zones. The nearest habitable planet, she
estimated, could be as close as 11 light-years. In the cosmic scheme of
things, that is next door and reachable in our lifetimes with current or
near-future technology."

Maybe 10 billion, in just this galaxy, out of the billions of
galaxies in the part of the universe we can detect.

We called it our
Age of
Discovery when we were floating about and finding things on our own
modest (but lovely) planet, centuries ago. And here we are, still
discovering new worlds, with centuries' more discoveries to come.

There's still the nagging
Fermi
paradox: if life is ubiquitous (as the conditions for it seem to
be), how come we haven't heard from anybody extraterrestrial?
Give it time. We just figured out gravity and thermodynamics, after
all.

13.May.2016

Dude got off WAY cheap

The Oregonian/OregonLive reports that
the
first Oregon standoff defendant plead guilty with a pretty sweet
bargain under the circumstances, which included the crimes being
really well-document on social media. One count of theft,
in exchange for some room and board, and assistance getting back on his
feet.

"[H]e's expected to face six months in prison followed by two years of
supervised release. He's agreed to undergo a mental health evaluation
and spend up to 120 days at a residential re-entry program or treatment
center. Willingham also has agreed to pay an undetermined amount of
restitution..."

The treatment will hopefully bring him to reconsider "complet[ing] his
duty to stop tyranny in federal law enforcement" and assassinating
county officials he doesn't care for. And maybe getting his music
career back on track?

Restraint of trade

While everyone's going half-nuts about Facebook supposedly manipulating
public opinion, how about this business decision from another of our
galactic IT overlords? David Graff, Google's Director of Global Product
Policy
announced
it in a blog post:

"We will no longer allow ads for loans where repayment is due within 60
days of the date of issue. In the U.S., we are also banning ads for
loans with an APR of 36% or higher."

Back when "usury" was a thing we had laws against, that was the ballpark
ceiling I remember. 20-something or 30-something percent is ginormous.
36% interest is enough to double the amount you owe in just 27
months. (Not that they give you that long to pay; you'd be rolling it to
a new loan, with new fees, multiple times long before one year was up,
let alone two.)

The
report
in the New York Times has some people and organizations
praising the move, and some deriding it.
The Community Financial Services Association of America (gosh that
sounds like a fine organization, doesn't it?) which says it works to
preserve “access to short-term credit for millions of Americans,”
criticized the move, calling it “discriminatory and a form of
censorship.”

But no, if a business decides they don't want to do
business with you, that is not "a form of censorship."
It's a "blanket assessment," sure enough, against loans with
two months or less repayment, and usurious interest rates.
The Online Lenders Alliance defends usury by citing the Federal
Reserve's estimate that almost half of Americans ("47%" comes
up again, hmm) "are not prepared to handle a $400 unexpected expense,"
so... companies willing to turn that into a $500 or $600 expense in
short order are yeah, just providing a necessary service.

Dewey, Cheatham and Howe

Used to think that was just a lawyer-jokey name, but it turns out far
north Idaho has a legislator with the possibly unfortunate centerpiece
for a surname. He's never really showed up on my radar, until this eve
of the primary, when he made Betsy Russell's Eye on Boise blog
with this:
Rep.
Cheatham’s campaign letter on what appears to be copy of official House
stationery raises questions. Russell noted that if the
bottom-of-page disclaimer on the letter is true ("All costs associated
with this mailing, including stationery, envelopes, or postage, have
been paid by Don Cheatham”), it wouldn't "technically violate the law
against using public resources for private gain."

(Good thing he didn't put some
Idaho® Potato
livery on his letter; Mr. Potatohead would have come down on his sorry
tater like a load of sour cream in defense of the state's commercial
interests. We're not nearly as fussy about our House of
Representatives.)

Asked why the letter says across the top, “House of Representatives,
State of Idaho,” Cheatham retorted angrily, “Because that’s where I
work!” He demanded a retraction and threatened to sue this reporter and
newspaper for defamation; we stand by our story.

Hey, you can't buy campaign publicity like this!

Spoon-fed

Farhad
Manjoo goes off
on the import of Facebook's "built-in bias," suitable for a wind-up to a
Congressional inquiry. Since Congress doesn't seem to have much else to
do, why not? While they're at it, bring in some of the Fox News
wizards to explain how the news being fed to Roger Ailes' hapless
viewers is "fair and balanced."

But facts. There should be some facts, shouldn't there?
A billion-plus people "devour the Facebook News Feed every day,"
seriously? The "cargo ships of profit," those seem to be sailing, at
least. But let's get the terms straight: the "news feed" on Facebook, is
determined first of all by what
you've
configured, and who you've affiliated with as "friends." The subject of
recent alarums is the "trending topics" box, which in my world has a
(very) short list of headlines, a "see more" link, and pretty much zero
mindshare. (Just now: something about earth mounds in Columbia turning
out to be "worm excrement," a "red tide" spreading in Chile, and a mummy
in Egypt.)

"Across the industry, reporters, editors and media executives now look to
Facebook the same way nesting baby chicks look to their engorged mother
— as the source of all knowledge and nourishment, the model for how to
behave in this scary new-media world. Case in point: The New York
Times, among others, recently began an initiative to broadcast live
video."

Haven't seen any of said "live video," but I've watched a few of the
professionally produced video pieces on the NYT, which are about as bear
as much resemblance to the average video snippet on Facebook as... I
don't know, Broadway to home video. But Manjoo insists that Facebook is
the "maintreamiest of all social networks," and flying "under a veneer
of empiricism."

"Many people believe that what you see on Facebook represents some kind
of data-mined objective truth unmolested by the subjective attitudes of
fair-and-balanced human beings."

And so on, expanding the wildest imagining of how Facebook might be
manipulating us. Perhaps I missed the equal concern he must have
expressed for how Fox and friends, the Koch brothers, the energy
industry, the health care insurance industry and on and on have been
poisoning the pool of objective truth. Seems just possibly
a bit
more alarming than Facebook's hive of like-minded individuals finding
ways to amplify their confirmation biases and drive ad views.

There's no evidence, he admits, "but the danger is nevertheless real."
Can it do what's never been done before? Probably. Can it do what
has been done, many many times before, better? I'm sure.
Will it? Why wouldn't it, if there's money to be made. Or even if its
management, rich beyond the need of avarice, has a whim to experiment.
There's this, though (with all the original links I didn't follow
embedded):

This is the ultimate market solution, promoting free markets with the
best possible manipulation in its own favor. Senator Thune and the
Senate Commerce Committee should be celebrating this most capitalistic
bastian of success, rather than trying to "expose" something nefarious
and spoil the show.

11.May.2016

Not a reason, but maybe an explanation

The public letter has the same attraction as the guy on a soapbox at
Speakers'
Corner; a pleasant diversion on a sunny day, and occasionally
engaging if the topic and/or speaker are good enough. I've posted a few
myself, so I can't be too critical of the absurdity of the genre. But
still, George Rasley's
Dear Mr. Trump
has a certain... presumptive feel to it. Rasley speaks for all
true conservatives, as "ConservativeHQ" editor and all, and responding
to the "steady drumbeat of emails, phone calls and social media hits
from close friends, vague acquaintances and complete strangers
demanding, with increasing ferocity, that [he] “get on board” and
support Donald Trump for President." He wants us to know that "We Vote
For Eternal Principles, Not Self-Interested Politicians."

And by the way, he's not afraid of either Donald Trump or Hillary
Clinton. "My family stood against the tyranny of kings and popes,
followed their conscience, and preached the Gospel when doing so meant
fire and the stake." (Time for a third party candidate, hmm?)

"Perhaps fighting tyrants and being rebels is genetically encoded in some
people, certainly country class Americans have a surfeit of that trait
and my family is no exception to that."

"Country class Americans" is a term of art I hadn't come across before.
Sounds kind of like you had a relative that came over on the Mayflower
or something? But he goes on, in stirring detail about all the bona
fides of his ancestry and class and politics, including having
family members who attended the first Republican National Convention in
1856. As if... there really were a connection between that party
and today's. Something we can agree on:

"Believe me, no one is more disappointed in the present state of the
Republican Party than I am."

But perhaps for different reasons.

Fishing around further, I found this six year old special Summer Issue
cover story in the American Spectator:
America’s
Ruling Class — And the Perils of Revolution, which defines "country
class" as the antithesis of the
political (a.k.a. the ruling, or even more gloriously, the
"regime") class. It is "the majority of Americans not oriented to
government."

"The two classes have less in common culturally, dislike each other more,
and embody ways of life more different from one another than did the
19th century's Northerners and Southerners—nearly all of whom, as
Lincoln reminded them, "prayed to the same God." By contrast, while most
Americans pray to the God "who created and doth sustain us," our ruling
class prays to itself as "saviors of the planet" and improvers of
humanity."

Not to get all theocratic on us or anything. But the part about "The
Political Divide," in which we're told that "sooner or later, well or
badly, that majority's demand for representation will be filled" starts
to look prescient. George Wallace, Ross Perot, and now Donald Trump.
This was the summer before Obama's first midterm, remember, when the Tea
Party was forming its inchoate scream that became the Republican
majority in the House (and eventually in the Senate as well), and our
experiment to just say No, No, No to everything. The economic collapse
from the creative finance real estate bubble, and the bailout of
too-big-to-fail institutions (and none of the hapless individuals on the
wrong end of the stick) was top of mind. The outrage of The Affordable
Care Act was an open wound. (The Hill has a fascinating
month-by-month selection of events of
the
year of the Tea Party events, winding up with Congress's job
approval hitting the lowest ever on record, and the death of 6,000
earmarks.)

Most of the way through the summer special screed, and after the sins
and the lust for power of the ruling class are well and truly itemized,
we come to The Country Class remainder, "problematic because it
is so heterogeneous."

"It has no privileged podiums, and speaks with many voices, often
inharmonious. It shares above all the desire to be rid of rulers it
regards inept and haughty. It defines itself practically in terms of
reflexive reaction against the rulers' defining ideas and
proclivities—e.g., ever higher taxes and expanding government,
subsidizing political favorites, social engineering, approval of
abortion, etc. Many want to restore a way of life largely superseded.
Demographically, the country class is the other side of the ruling
class's coin: its most distinguishing characteristics are marriage,
children, and religious practice. While the country class, like the
ruling class, includes the professionally accomplished and the mediocre,
geniuses and dolts, it is different because of its non-orientation to
government and its members' yearning to rule themselves rather than be
ruled by others."

The Country Class "includes all those in stations high and low who are
aghast at how relatively little honest work yields, by comparison with
what just a little connection with the right bureaucracy can get you."
The little guys (and maybe some gals), the honest Joes, the decent, the
Moral Majority, all the people who root for underdogs. The fundamental
indignation boils down to this: If the politicians are so smart, why
have they made life worse?

Compared to what can't be answered, so it might as well not be
asked.

10.May.2016

Bias in social media? Shocking!

Facebook is an advertising medium, enjoying the success that comes from
its wonderfully engaging interface. It's not journalism, obviously, and
the recent apoplexy from "conservative" types who've accepted the
hearsay accusations is unexpectedly comic. There's some sort of feed of
news stories, I hear, off on the right side? I never look on the right
side, because that's where the ads come in, and I'm never interested in
those. (Especially not when I shop for something I am interested
in, and ads for said thing follow me around for days. What a
racket!)

The
NPR story on the reactions from people who feel like they're...
being tricked? Being surpressed? Censored? has some crazy stuff.
The Republican Party thinks Facebook might swing the election against
them! And the chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, John Thune of
South Dakota:

"Facebook must answer these serious allegations and hold those
responsible to account if there has been political bias in the
dissemination of trending news," Thune said in a statement, according to
The Hill. "Any attempt by a neutral and inclusive social media platform
to censor or manipulate political discussion is an abuse of trust and
inconsistent with the values of an open Internet."

Actually, Facebook need not answer those allegations, although if
the Senators can find time in their busy schedule to have a hearing, it
could make for some entertainment. If the company wants to be "neutral
and inclusive," they can do that. If they want to be biased and
exclusive, like Fox News (say), and run parody news and other
sorts of nonsense, they can do that, too. It would be fabulous to have
Thune's committee get schooled by some Facebook executive, maybe even
Mark Zuckerberg himself, and get a little lesson in the 1st
Amendment.

Also, a lesson in business. And "an open internet."

Grinding justice

To the extent that the cattle running wild on federal land are actually
property of Cliven Bundy or his family, they're not worth the trouble to
track down and round up. They are a nuisance, whether running
wild, or the basis of another standoff between federal land management
and the right-wing seditionists. Putting them out of their misery would
be an improvement for all concerned, by all factual reports. But the
latest
report picked up by The Guardian continues the tropes of the old
west, calling Bundy's melon farm and gateway to public land a "ranch"
and talking about the cattle as if they were a valuable asset.

Bailey Logue, one of Cliven’s daughters, scoffed at those allegations,
saying the family’s cattle were in “great health”.

Sons Ryan and Ammon are
not
satisfied with prison food, calling it "unpalatable." We are not
surprised. Nor are we surprised that
creative,
new legal arguments keep popping up in their case. They meant to
"force a civil court to take up the constitutionality of federal land
management policy," but apparently didn't get good advice on how to
pursue that strategy. You could do that without leaving home, in fact.
Ammon "isn't an extremist and doesn't hold anti-government views," the
story now goes, but there is really no one credulous enough to entertain
that. Or this:

"[His lawyers] characterize Bundy as a constitutional originalist who
adheres to similar philosophies as U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence
Thomas, the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and Supreme Court
nominee Robert Bork."

Yay, verily.

How to make shopping as annoying as possible

Time passes, and Jeanette's seldom-used frequent flyer account with
United has some small number of miles set to expire. They're not worth
much, but if it's possible to keep them alive without too much
trouble, we'd like to. It all depends on what you think is trouble, I
guess. First off, logging into the MileagePlus site. That should be easy,
right? "United.com" is new, of course, and it asks for a number, or
username, I give it the latter, out of my PasswordSafe collection.
It responds with a remarkable amount of red pixels. (Better go
bold, too. User might overlook the fact that it failed.)

! The account information you entered is not valid. PINs are no longer
accepted if you have updated your account security, and usernames and
emails are currently not accepted. If you’ve forgotten any of your
information, please use the links below for help.

MileagePlus Number
(username and e-mail address sign-on are currently
unavailable)

Fine, whatever. Second try with the good old number works. And now it
wants to “enhance security” with a password update and some security
questions. “You have 21 days to make these updates.” Or else. They won't
ask so politely three weeks from now.

Ignoring that, and moving on to “shopping,” and the possibility of some
affinity-tagged deal that will ping the account and keep it alive, I
consider the possibilities and see Sears, reminding me I've been
meaning to buy some vacuum cleaner bags. There isn't any
particular discount deal for those (of course), but... just
shopping at Sears looks like it should be enough. Maybe. I click through
to... another login form. (Even though the top line shows the "Welcome
back" message, indicating I am still logged in.) Don't fight it!
Login again! And hey, you've got 21 days for that security update!

Through to sears.com, finally, and search for the part number, and find
a surprising huge list of variations sold by third parties, the “Sears &
marketplace” realm. Prices all over the place, WAY too many choices for
quantity and type. Really out of control. How about... a dozen for
$10.49, marked down from whatever. Free shipping, allow 10 days. Fine.
Yay.

Any chance this 10 step process will actually stay tied to the
MileagePlus deal? Seems exceedingly unlikely, and pretty much no way to
know for sure. But we can hope. And see. Supposed to be 2 miles per
dollar spent, so we should have a 21 mile keep-alive bump. By May 31?
On the one hand, what's their incentive for alacrity? On the other, if
it's not designed to "just work," how could it work 7 or 15 or 30 days
down the road?

At least will have the vacuum cleaner bags.

Oh, I almost forgot: the
MileagePlus
Shopping Frequently Asked Questions. The "basics" list includes my
favorite: Is this a scam?
"No, but the process can be a tad confusing...." They answer the FAQ of
"when" those precious miles will be posted to your account with "3-5
days," "typically." Or maybe "up to 45 days." One or the other,
depending on the store.

Update (5/28): What do you know, it actually worked. I checked
the account close to the due date, and 20-some miles had been posted and
the expiration pushed out to the end of November, 2017.

9.May.2016

Not quite breezing to a seventh term

Terms in the U.S. Senate are six years at a whack, which makes the idea
of someone "breezing to a seventh term" a rather amazing thing. You
can't do that until you have most of thirty-six years in, for
starters, and since you have to be 30 years old to get started, that
would be a lot more than what passes for a whole career these days.
Three and a half-decades, and pushing for more than four.

Chuck Grassley has been a merry old pol since well before the 1980
election. He put in three terms in the U.S. House, and a decade and a
half in the Iowa state legislature before that. He's been a politician
for more than half a century, and he still wants more.

That kind of tenure must come with a sense of entitlement that's hard
for an ordinary person to imagine. The pinnacle of that expression would
be his just saying "no" to even considering the president's nominee for
the Supreme Court. Not voting "no," mind you, but trying to
prevent anyone from voting, yay, or nay. As if the Constitution's
"advice and consent" extended to the point of sabotage and dissent.

That sort of outrageous sense of privilege might be a bridge too far for
the octogenarian. The
NYT's
First Draft column
has a list of "surprises
in store this week" for Grassley: a report critical of the work of the
Judiciary Committee under Grassley; a Wednesday news conference with a
group of former supporters now disaffected; highlighting polls showing
that Grassley "has been hurt more than other Republicans by his position
on Judge Garland," although, not enough (even 20 points not enough) to
spoil his chances for another term. Is his goal to die in office?

What else does he have to show for that half a century plus?

The king of broken promises

Donald Trump celebrates being the "king of debt," which he says he
understands "probably better than anybody." He's yuuuge in debt. Having
a business go bankrupt is no big deal for him; it's just another way to
make a deal to his advantage. Can he work the same "magic" that's
boosted his own inherited fortune on the U.S. economy?

Are we collectively stupid enough to sign up for that deal?
Or to take him at his word, that he's really, really smart and everyone
else totally missed the "opportunity" that only he can see?
People who said he's crazy,
they're
the crazy ones.

"I love debt but you know, debt is tricky and it's dangerous and you have
to be careful and you have to know what you're doing."

It's "a great thrill" to make money by buying discounted mortgages.
That's all he was talking about. If interest rates go up, we can buy
back our debt at a discount, and... issue new debt at the higher rate.
Except he didn't say that. And the idea that his knowledge of real
estate debt somehow translates to understanding of municipal (let alone
international) finance debt is as preposterous as most of his clown show.

"All I said is that if interest rates go up, we'll have a chance to buy
back bonds at a discount, which is standard. Certainly I'm not talking
about renegotiating with creditors."

Good to know, even if that's not actually "all he said" last week.
What
the NYT said he said:

Asked on Thursday whether the United States needed to pay its debts in
full, or whether he could negotiate a partial repayment, Mr. Trump told
the cable network CNBC, “I would borrow, knowing that if the economy
crashed, you could make a deal.” He added, “And if the economy was good,
it was good. So, therefore, you can’t lose.”

So yeah, it was a vague and possibly meaningless enough hand-waving
notion that of course he didn't mean anything by any of that. Just
another win-win if you like Trump Kool-aid.

Is this all part of the wheeling and dealing, where Trump
says one thing, and then turns around and says the opposite, or
something equally bizarre in a different direction? It seems like a
random walk by a deranged ego, but if it were a strategy... even if an
accidental one, it could be unexpectedly brilliant. Does
the
power of contradiction explain Trump's smashing success? If you say
everything, anyone listening can choose to believe whatever they want to.

"Blatant contradiction puts the responsibility back onto the shoulders of
the listener. If I simply deny what I earlier affirmed and act as if
nothing has happened, then you are left having to decide what I really
meant. And psychology, as well as common sense, tells us that human
beings are prone to “confirmation bias.” That is, we tend to interpret
evidence so that it conforms to what we already believe."

Say it loudly, and confidently.

"Mr. Trump’s explicit lack of authenticity is what makes him so
authentic. He is like a walking oxymoron (which is perhaps not
surprising, given that reality TV is the medium in which he has most
flourished). To some, that he is contradicting himself so freely shows
that he really doesn’t care what “they” (read: the news media, liberals,
women, minorities) think. The signal this sends is one of strength: Only
the strong can afford not to care."

8.May.2016

Grandma's got a gun

Nevada assemblywoman, Congressional hopeful, and
ammosexual
pinup girl Michele Fiore takes the "good guy with a gun" concept one
step further. Really, you can only trust yourself, so hey, if a law
enforcement officer points a gun at you, you're good to
prepare
to return fire. "She said that self-defense includes the right to
aim back at anyone who points a gun at you first—and to put your own
life ahead of theirs."

What could possibly go wrong?

Fiore made some news in the Malheur Wildlife Refuge story earlier this
year, acting as a voice of reason, sort of. (It's a low bar.) One of the
other actors in all that, fellow by the name of Michael Emry, is also in
the news this weekend,
getting
arrested for having a full-auto .50 caliber machine gun. With the
serial number filed off, to, uh, hide is tracks or something.
As an added plot twist, the FBI rounded up Emry in John Day, home of the
"constitutional" Sheriff who was sympathetic to the Bundy clan's
anti-federal cause.

6.May.2016

Let's make a deal

The guy who wrote the book that nobody I know will admit to reading, and
who presided over a ton of business failures while keeping his own
account flush through bankuptcy after bankruptcy has a "brilliant" idea
for how to make America great again, with less debt:
"you
could make a deal."

That's right, he thinks he could talk the creditors of the United States of
America into taking a discount on our full faith and credit. Binyamin
Appelbaum notes drily that "Such remarks by a major presidential
candidate have no modern precedent." And more directly:

"Mr. Trump’s statement might show the limits of translating his business
acumen into the world of government finance. The United States simply
cannot pursue a similar strategy. The government runs an annual deficit,
so it must borrow to retire existing debt. Any measures that would
reduce the value of the existing debt, making it cheaper to repurchase,
would increase the cost of issuing new debt. Such a threat also could
undermine the stability of global financial markets."

Maybe one of the brilliant people Trump is certain to be hiring for his
team could come up to speed by reading
a
Wikipedia article on the subject, or perhaps
something
from the government itself and learn that the apart from the 41% of
Treasury Securities held by the Federal Reserve and intragovernmental
holdings, there's the quarter held by banks and depository institutions,
US savings bond holders, private and state and local government pension
funds, insurance companies, and mutual funds.

Singling out the foreign and international investors he imagines could
take a haircut with no recourse wouldn't be quite as easy as
filing for another Trump Company bankruptcy.

5.May.2016

Welcoming our new galactic overlord

The Republican Party has been barking at the bus and running after it
for all these years, and now... they caught it!
The
day of reckoning, or at least one hell of a hangover must now be
dealt with. They've run through denial, anger, bargaining and depression,
mostly. Is it time for grudging acceptance?
Reince
Preibus came around quickly enough, but he's had some practice with
contortionism.

Others are lining up to declare that party loyalty trumps sanity.
Idaho's Tea Party darling Congressman (and "staunch conservative")
Raúl Labrador gets a sentence, saying he would support Mr. Trump but
derided him for “not knowing much about the Constitution or
politics.” As opposed to... himself, some sort of Constitutional scholar
and political whiz. (Tell us the one about
the
2014 GOP state convention fiasco you presided over again, uncle
Raúl!)

It's not about who turned out to be the nominee, or why
things have gone so horribly insane, it's just about The Party,
so never mind hating women and banning Muslims and mob violence and
self-funding by the really, really rich guy who keeps declaring
bankruptcy, it's time to raise money! And cut your losses if you need
to. Or polish that résumé:

"Some staff members at the Republican National Committee were told
Wednesday that if they were unable to get behind the nominee, they
should leave by the end of the week."

Other political staffers are suddenly "too busy" to return calls, but
the lubricious Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, found something
to celebrate. Mr. Trump had “the opportunity and the obligation to unite
our party around our goals,” the statement read, tiptoeing around the
elephant, ever so carefully. The retroactively prescient William
Kristol opined that he thought “people are underestimating the degree to
which you could see a crisis in the Republican Party,” as if he'd fallen
asleep last June and just woke up.

With a splitting headache.

And a lot to write about
just
how wrong everyone was about Trump's chances. No way. Zero chance.
Absolutely a joke. Doomed, sooner or later.

4.May.2016

Semifinal

As the vapors suggesting we might have not one but two contested
national party conventions this time around burn off in the bright sun
of the final primary contests (Bernie's "big win" in Indiana, after
Hillary punted notwithstanding), there is some time to mine the last
couple millennia of literature to make sense of our Zeitgeist.
Andrew
Sullivan has at it, at length, for NY Magazine, starting with
Plato's Republic, where he finds that the apotheosis of
democracy, "a political system of maximal freedom and equality, where
every lifestyle is allowed and public offices are filled by a lottery"
creating the fairest regime of all makes a fetid breeding ground for a
tyrant.

"He is usually of the elite but has a nature in tune with the time —
given over to random pleasures and whims, feasting on plenty of food and
sex, and reveling in the nonjudgment that is democracy’s civil religion.
He makes his move by “taking over a particularly obedient mob” and
attacking his wealthy peers as corrupt. If not stopped quickly, his
appetite for attacking the rich on behalf of the people swells further.
He is a traitor to his class — and soon, his elite enemies, shorn of
popular legitimacy, find a way to appease him or are forced to flee.
Eventually, he stands alone, promising to cut through the paralysis of
democratic incoherence. It’s as if he were offering the addled,
distracted, and self-indulgent citizens a kind of relief from
democracy’s endless choices and insecurities."

Can it happen here? Did the Founding Fathers do their homework
sufficiently well "to guard our democracy from the tyranny of the
majority and the passions of the mob" with the "large, hefty barriers
between the popular will and the exercise of power"? We seem poised to
find out the answers, as this revolution will be televised. The "truly
revolutionary form" of the "media democracy" that has run out ahead of
our ability to understand what we're doing to ourselves, "everyone
became a kind of blogger" as we enjoy "peer-to-peer" storytelling
"almost completely free of editing or interference" and the editorial
judgement of elites.

Eight years ago, the disparate possibilities were made evident between
upstart celebrities. We "lucked out at first" by electing the one with
"a preternaturally rational and calm disposition" instead of the
outsider "tailor-made for reality TV, proud of her own ignorance about
the world." But this "John the Baptist for the true messiah of conservative
populism" did not disappear, she was "waiting patiently and
strategically for his time to come."

This is an old, well-worn genre, for as much as it seems impossibly
brand new. Plato, after all. Sinclair Lewis' 1935 novel,
It
Can’t Happen Here. Eric Hoffer's 1951 classic,
The
True Believer. The Donald as Buzz Windrip, or less obscurely,
Biff
Tannen, "a blonde, casino-owning jackass living in a Vegas-style palace."
We just don't know if we're on the verge of comedy, or genunine
tragedy.

"Neo-fascist movements do not advance gradually by persuasion; they
first transform the terms of the debate, create a new movement based on
untrammeled emotion, take over existing institutions, and then
ruthlessly exploit events. And so current poll numbers are only
reassuring if you ignore the potential impact of sudden, external events
— an economic downturn or a terror attack in a major city in the months
before November. I have no doubt, for example, that Trump is sincere in
his desire to “cut the head off” ISIS, whatever that can possibly mean.
But it remains a fact that the interests of ISIS and the Trump campaign
are now perfectly aligned. Fear is always the would-be tyrant’s greatest
ally."

Industrial strength white privilege

It's one thing to get elected Governor in one of the states that started
as a colony, and then to accept a "gifts in return for favors" (as
Zephyr
Teachout delicately puts it for the New York Times), or what
we used to just call "bribes." The good, old-fashioned kind, too:
expensive vacations, a Rolex, a $20,000 shopping spree, $15,000 in
catering expenses for a daughter’s wedding and tens of thousands of
dollars in private loans.

Not sure how six weeks ranks for trial duration or complexity, but
Teachout says "it was not a complicated case," and back in
September 2014, a jury convicted Bob McDonnell and his wife for what
they did.

Here's the privilege: appealing the case to the Supreme Court on
First Amendment grounds. Money talks, don't you know, and Bob and
Mo were just enjoying the freedom of their expression.

"And the justices seem poised to agree. Their main worry appeared to be
that Mr. McDonnell’s prosecution had criminalized what they perceived as
normal, day-to-day political behavior — seemingly more concerned for the
chilling effect of federal bribery law on an elected official who
accepts a Rolex than for the citizens who are hurt by such self-serving
behavior. ...

"In its Citizens United ruling, the court gutted campaign finance laws.
It acknowledged that American politics faced the threat of gift-givers
and donors trying to corrupt the system, but it held that campaign
finance laws were the wrong way to deal with that problem; bribery laws
were the better path. Now, though, the court seems ready to gut bribery
laws, saying that campaign finance laws provide a better approach. But
if both campaign finance laws and bribery laws are now regarded as
problematic, what’s left?"

Maybe SCOTUS will come up with something, but if Teachout's read of
their lean is correct, and the court enshrines a "right" to sell access
to the highest bidder, count the credibility of our highest court among
the casualties.

2.May.2016

Bad ideas that won't go away

Idaho Co. Commissioner's Jim Chmelik's
raving
conspiracy theory, dispensed at an "educational" event that just
happened to look a lot like campaigning for a bunch of the folks who
were there.

"As soon as they get done working on getting us kicked off these lands,
they’re going to come after your private property. That’s their
goal."

Funny thing is, I'm a lot more concerned about the likes of Chmelik
coming after our public property than I am about ... is it the Army
Corps of Engineers he thinks is going to implement the socialistic
takeover? Dispensing below-cost rural electrification and irrigation
projects to lull us into docility?

For his part, former Idaho Sen. and Governor-wannabe Russ Fulcher said
some sensible things about the differences between the manufacturing and
resource-based jobs of yore and today's "service-based" jobs. Before
running off the rails himself. Not that there's anything wrong with
honest service, but "if you want to focus on real wealth creation,"
apparently you have to dig it out of the ground, or cut it off the
land.

"[Rep. Judy] Boyle [(Far right-Midvale)] argued that public lands are
poorly managed by the federal government, and in turn they have been
destroyed by wildfires. Critics argue that managing wildfires on public
lands would put Idaho in debt. According to a 2014 study by the
University of Idaho’s Policy Analysis Group, taking control of federal
public lands could cost Idaho $111 million a year.

"Fulcher said those costs could be offset by cashing in on Idaho’s
natural, albeit non-renewable, resources, including gold, silver and
natural gas."

That's right. There's gold, silver and gas in them thar hills, and if we
dig it up, why we'll be able to use it to manage land that the federal
government should give us to manage, because we are So Much Smarter And
Closer To It than they are. If you don't believe me, just ask Chmelik,
Boyle or Fulcher.

May Day

How did we overload the 1st of May and dancing strewn with spring
flowers with a distress call, I wonder? They were intertwined in my mind
yesterday, as I was making my third road trip in as many weeks, in a
third direction: from Boise to Bend and back, to retrieve our river gear
that the next party down the Owyhee R. behind us had picked up and
hauled out. Their trip continued past Three Forks to Rome, where they
took out on Saturday, searched up my phone number from what was in my
wallet and called me on their way home to the other side of Oregon.

I could've saved myself the trouble of cancelling the credit card I'd
carried, and replacing my driver's license last week, if only I'd known
someone was going to collect it all, look after it, and get it back to
us.

The drive gave me a chance to stop in Ontario and pick up copies of the
Argus Observer; our story running in the Sunday edition, under
the catchy headline
"Stranded"
at the top left of the front page. After a very brief initial report
earlier in the week, based on what the Sheriff office's had given her,
Mackenzie McCreary did a nice job of bugging me for more information and
turning it into a feature. (She wanted to talk to me on the phone, and I
put her off thinking I was too busy for that, then spent a lot more time
writing up a long account and sending it by email. As often happens, it
was only in the writing things down that many of the pieces fit together
for me.)

One of the sidebar items for lessons learned got a bit confused, from my
failure to make myself clear. Having stuff "in lots of dry bags" goes
without saying on a river trip; the "know where things are" was about
the fact that most dry bags are opaque, and our retrospective interest
in distributing essential gear in such a way as to still have enough
essentials if you lose a boat. (Lose a boat?! Yeah, that's beyond the
typical calamity you plan for, but it could happen.)

The other thing clear in retrospect is the importance of communication
in an environment where it's so hard to come by. Matt's and my final
camp was downstream of where David had pulled out the remainder
of our jetsam. I didn't know, and even though I went back and forth
along the stretch where it was, I never saw it. It must've been in one
of those stretches where big boulders along the bank made it easier to
traverse up higher through the juniper, or smaller rocks. It was obvious
from the river, not so obvious from where I was hiking back and forth.
As far as I knew, our stuff was down a lazy river and beyond our
retrieval.